American Movie
About this episode
The episode discusses the documentary 'American Movie' and its exploration of creativity and the American Dream through the lens of filmmaker Mark Borchardt.
This week we start season 13 in earnest as we talk a month of documentaries! We watched American Movie, a film about being creative, the American Dream, and keeping the Surge nice and chilled. RIP to Uncle Billy! This week on Myopia Movies, we're trading the usual fictional disasters for a documented one. Chris Smith's American Movie follows Mark Borchardt — Wisconsin's answer to Orson Welles, if Orson Welles had a day job at a cemetery and financed his art through a combination of paper routes and his uncle's life savings — as he attempts, against all reason and budget, to finish his short horror film Coven. It's not a movie about filmmaking so much as a movie about willpower, and what happens when that willpower vastly outpaces talent, funding, sobriety, and — in at least one memorable scene — the ability to say the word "coven" without flubbing it forty separate times. Mark's business partner Mike Schank drifts through every frame like a man who found inner peace by accident and never bothered to explain how. Family members get roped into acting roles they clearly didn't audition for. A wall gets punched. A head goes through a cabinet, on purpose, for art. We riff on a lot of…
People in this episode
Host: Nic Hoffmann
Topics covered
- documentary
- creativity
- American Dream
- filmmaking
- willpower
- horror film
Keywords
- American Movie
- Mark Borchardt
- documentary
- Coven
- filmmaking
- horror film
- creativity
- willpower
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Chris Smith
Books & works: American Movie, Coven
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